


i'm almost me again, he's almost you

by SyntheticRevenge



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Peter Lukas Ruins His Own Life: More At Ten, Possession Angst???, Requited Unrequited Love, There's no good tagset for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:06:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25804096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SyntheticRevenge/pseuds/SyntheticRevenge
Summary: Peter’s always been sure he’s walking straight to his tragicomedic demise at the end of a long, red string, bound to someone so distant he’s just a silhouette in the sun, wings not quite melting yet.(Seven moments of loving Jonah, despite the warning signs.)
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Peter Lukas/Jonah Magnus
Comments: 11
Kudos: 91





	i'm almost me again, he's almost you

**Author's Note:**

> I've been meaning to write lonelyeyes for ages and this somehow came out as one of my favorite things I've ever written. Hope you enjoy.
> 
> (Also I'm sorry for the Hozier title but. The line fits them so well.)

i.

Peter tells himself he doesn’t love James Wright. 

He doesn’t. He loves the formless thing that lives in James Wright’s body, vibrates his vocal cords, shaves his face, pierces his ears, dresses him. James Wright is just a Halloween costume to the man Peter actually loves.

Peter knows nothing about what Jonah looks like, beyond the eyes. Light, cruel, piercing. He always thought all the poets were wrong about windows to the soul until he met Jonah. Then he truly understood what it meant for eyes to dance, to light up, to see through someone. 

The eyes are all he has to hold on to that’s Jonah’s. The rest is James.

He doesn’t love James. He’s never  _ met _ James. But sometimes he imagines what he would be like, that violated, repressed, shattered soul Jonah reached in and tore out with a flick of his metaphysical wrist. Peter imagines him stern, but soft. Kind-eyed. Gentle. Anyone’s gentler than Jonah, and while his eyes could be described with a great many words in the English language or any other, ‘kind’ wouldn’t be among them.

He wouldn’t love him if he were kind.

There is nothing lonelier than to lay in bed with a man he’s never met and long for him, while the devil he knows intimately and still not at all stares straight through him and sees someone else.

There is nothing lonelier, and that’s why Peter always comes home to him, in the end. It feels like being at sea. It feels like a lighthouse beam in the distance that just gets farther away the faster he goes towards it.

ii.

Jonah thinks Shakespearean tragedies are ten times funnier than anything that’s ever been on TV, and Peter loves him for it. He laughs at how obvious all of the solutions to their problems were, how they just didn’t see them, how easy they were to avoid. How mortal and insignificant they all were. 

Of course he thinks it’s funny. He sees everything. No tragedy would ever befall him. Peter suggested once that possibly his hubris will get him in the end, like Icarus, and Jonah just laughed and said Icarus was a fantastic example of a tragic idiot.

Is it worse to be the tragic idiot, or the person in the tragic idiot’s frighteningly captivating thrall, half-loved, half-seen, completely known? Peter wonders that, sometimes.

Best not to dwell. Peter’s always been sure he’s walking straight to his tragicomedic demise at the end of a long, red string, bound to someone so distant he’s just a silhouette in the sun, wings not quite melting yet.

iii.

Half-asleep, Jonah calls him Mordechai. It’s a mumble, an exhausted slur. He wakes in the middle of the night and sees Peter’s eyes and, in them, a man Peter never met and has no idea how to be.

He struggles briefly against his god, against the frigid fog that fingers tendrils around his painfully constant heart.  _ He doesn’t even love  _ you _ , _ it squeezes into his bloodstream in Morse code.  _ He’ll never love  _ you.

Maybe he won’t. Peter’s not sure what he’d do with Jonah’s love, anyway. It would be an oddly-shaped thing, too bizarre to carry around, all sharp angles and jagged edges. 

He resists the urge to disappear. He sails out again in the morning. He can stay, for now.

iv.

Even when he’s at sea and the fog swallows him from every direction and he has white-out moments of perfect quiet and solitude, he can feel the Eye on him, like a carrion bird circling, waiting for him to get tired of it all and come home.

Peter’s bad at resisting challenges, dares, bets, and Jonah watching him always feels like all three at once. Challenging him to resist it, daring him to stay away, betting him he can’t, and he’s nothing if not a degenerate gambler who loses over and over.

He always ends up back at Jonah’s door, never bothering to knock. Jonah usually greets him with something close to affectionate, like  _ hey, sailor  _ or  _ big man _ , before telling him he smells like the sea in a gently, routinely disgusted tone.

Peter barely fits in his shower, but as the steam consumes him, his mind predictably drifts to that anxious jolt of being  _ seen _ . 

Sick joke, to be desperately, perfectly lonely and yet never, ever alone.

v.

Some months before James Wright’s heart fails completely, Jonah tells Peter he wants his next body to be Elias Bouchard, and Peter laughs out loud, thinking it’s a joke. He’s met with the steely silence that means it in fact wasn’t, and Jonah’s angry with him for being amused. It’s a silence he’s intimately familiar with.

Knowing makes it worse, somehow. Peter drops by the Institute, periodically, to talk with Jonah and be glared at by Gertrude from a distance, and he can’t quite keep himself from magnetically wandering to Artefact Storage to watch Elias.

He never knew James. This is his chance to see the original inhabitant of the body he’ll likely love until he dies. It’s a bad idea, in the end, because Peter is, somehow, at his core, a hopeless romantic. All of the Regency romances that ‘remind Jonah of his youth’ rubbed off on him, or something, because he starts to feel something for the sad, lonely, stoned kid in that dark basement, completely unaware of the fate that’s going to hit him like a truck. Dramatic irony isn’t so fun in real life.

Peter thinks about taking him to be consumed by the Lonely. He would fit right in. 

He never gets the conviction to, though, just watches, unseen, as Elias lives out the last few months of his hazy, pointless life. Sometimes, his eyes catch on Peter like he can almost see him, and Peter’s heart catches, but after a few seconds, they pass over him again.

Then James dies, and Peter’s the one who has to hold Elias down and make the switch, and he apologizes so endlessly and senselessly he stops being aware of the fact that he’s even doing it.

It’s jarring to see Jonah’s eyes in Elias’s face. Almost sickening. Jonah doesn’t even thank Peter for what he did for him, and Peter leaves without saying goodbye and doesn’t come back for over a year.

vi.

Peter didn’t love James Wright, but he thinks he might love Elias Bouchard, and it’s ripping him apart. He stays away longer, sees Jonah for briefer periods each time he’s back. 

If Jonah knows what’s wrong, and he  _ must _ , he never mentions it. Not a word. He just molds Elias into some facsimile of himself and continues living like he’s still James and nothing’s changed. Nothing should’ve changed for Peter, either, but he’s lonelier than ever before. 

That cold, silent abyss yawns under him, like always, but it’s less comforting than it once was. He’s getting so  _ fucking  _ old. Someday, before too long, the Lonely won’t need him anymore, and Jonah won’t want him anymore, and then he’ll truly have the nothing and no one he always claims to.

vii.

Is it love or negligence if Jonah could’ve excruciatingly, painstakingly  _ known _ every centimetre of Peter’s soul and chose not to?

That’s the thought he lingers on, as the new, stupid, lovestruck Archivist rends his soul from his body, bores the Eye into him from all directions at once, and sees him clearly.

He didn’t want to give Jonah his last thoughts, but in the End of it all, who else would they be for? This is a play he should’ve known the ending of. One Jonah would laugh at, softly and cruelly. Peter’s dying soliloquy for no one but himself, and the one-man audience of the not-quite-human being in the distance, buzzing with rage and power and sight.

He wanted to die alone. He wanted to die free. Wanting means nothing, and it always has. He should’ve learned that a long time ago.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! All feedback is greatly appreciated<3  
> Find me on tumblr @witnesstotheend


End file.
